


everything

by thestrangerlosers



Category: IT (2017)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-29
Updated: 2018-04-29
Packaged: 2019-04-29 20:31:37
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,379
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14480637
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thestrangerlosers/pseuds/thestrangerlosers
Summary: ╭─━━━━━━━━━━─╮Richie knew he tended to hyperfixate on things, drawn like a moth to a flame caused by the effects of his fumbling fingers and hazy mind.One of his fixations came in the form of Bill Denbrough, with the craftsman hands, able to carve beauty out of darkness, able to touch like a baptism.╰─━━━━━━━━━━─╯aka: an insight into bichie





	everything

**Author's Note:**

> hello! this is my first published piece for this fandom so that's interesting! you can follow my tumblr here:
> 
>  
> 
> [my blog!](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/askderryhawkins)
> 
>  
> 
> but enjoy, please give feedback, kudos n comments or something 
> 
> (i don't know how this works if you couldn't tell)

Richie knew he tended to hyperfixate on things, drawn like a moth to a flame caused by the effects of his fumbling fingers and hazy mind.

 

One of his fixations came in the form of Bill Denbrough, with the craftsman hands, able to carve beauty out of darkness, able to touch like a baptism.

 

He wished to be touched by Bill Denbrough. But to be touched by Bill Denbrough was like a glimpse of the heavens, and for a _sinner_ like Richie was, so _unworthy_ , to be touched by Bill Denbrough was like gambling his life away like a half drunken addict for that next hit, to be touched by Bill Denbrough was like meddling with fate because Richie knew that Bill Denbrough was not his future.

 

Bill Denbrough was destined for great things, he deserved to heal. He deserved to wrap up his broken bones and chits of memories and slithers of broken heart and purify himself. Reckless but justified.

 

Richie knew that he’d die if Bill asked him to. He could hand him a rusted shovel and he’d dig his own grave, so long as he was able to touch the wonder of Bill’s lips just one time.

 

Yet.

 

Yet he feared the may devour him whole, suck him in like the deadlights, crawl into the space behind his ribs and sink into his warmth. Take comfort in the heat of Bill Denbrough’s arteries, letting himself be like poison in his veins. Grasp onto him like a pair of loving handcuffs.

 

That’s why when Bill confessed, mind hazy with the toxins of weed, the same crystally texture that clung to Richie’s fingertips like sand from the beaches they used to scour only a handful of years ago. They really weren’t as old as their years let them believe.

 

_ (They still had a lot of time together. Yet not enough. It’d end with a wife and a career, it’d be over in a sewer with the nostalgic clingings of wasted years. It’d end in a man with a mess of dark curls’ heart leaping at the sound of a stutter, without understanding why. It’d end in a multitude of characters written around a boy with a mouth louder than the sound of Bill’s own thumping heart when they’d reunite.) _

 

Richie laughed.

 

Bill, with his stitched and bandaged heart on his sleeve lying there in the pillows like a God to be worshipped, (Richie knew he’d fall to his knees for Bill if he so much as instigated he wanted him to), and all he wanted in the world was Richie Tozier.

 

It was unheard of, truly. He didn’t understand the fairness of the entire ordeal, Bill deserved more than Richie. He deserved a good life, a happy wife, a nice house with the painted fence and pretty flowers growing in the garden, ecstatic children hanging from his legs with the eyes of their unknown mother and the stubborn set smiles of their father. He knew he was thinking too far forward, but Bill had a habit of being able to make you do that. Imagine a life without him, so that the one you do share, you treasure more.

 

Richie just couldn’t understand how someone so strong, so great, so powerful could settle for something next to nothing.

 

And his face, the visard falling like closed shutters, like the ones in Bill’s room that they’d pulled down once the moon replaced the beaming sun. Jaw clenching like the hinge of his bedroom door that time he’d walked out on Richie, slamming it behind him when Richie had mentioned asking Eddie on a date. It’d only been a joke, a childish search for a punchline, Eddie an easy target considering their close friendship.

 

The hurt, _fuck the hurt_ , that shadowed his features like the black sky outside casting shadows upon the earth with its thick black blanket, illuminated by small stars. Richie supposed that was funny really, because if he was darkness, Bill was his light.

 

He tried. He really did try. To replace that hurt with hope, linking their fingers together like a patchwork quilt, the one that they’d shared last Christmas, huddled up by the television with cups of steaming tea, drawn into your usual Christmas flicks. Bill wasn’t bothered when Richie’s jiggling knee bumped into his on numerous occasions. Didn’t breathe a word when Richie’s fingers began toying with a loose string on Bill’s tracksuit bottomed leg instead. 

 

Richie felt that constant need to promise to become something more, but Bill didn’t want something more. He just wanted Richie.

 

If you were to ask him when he realised that, he’d say since they almost kissed at Richie’s seventeenth birthday, an event celebrated just by the lucky seven, cramped in Bill Denbrough’s basement with numerous bottles of flashy multi-coloured liquids, bottle lids sticking to the dark oak coffee table with questionable tacky substances. Richie sat there next to Bill, drunkenly laying his head on his shoulder, lolling in and out of sleep, curled up against his body.

 

He guessed that wasn’t unusual. 

 

It was what Richie said that threw him for a loop, telling him that Bill made him feel like he was dying. Bill never really understood what that meant. He felt that when he touched Richie, he only just learnt how to breathe.

 

It was later, in the corner of Bill’s empty kitchen, illuminated by the eerie fridge light that they almost kissed, noses bumping gently in contradiction to the way their lives connected, messily, catastrophically, _awfully_. Bill wasn’t sure who pulled away first, he just remembered the bittersweet sting of disappointment.

 

His want was whispered wordlessly when their lips collided, ‘finally’ we all gasped. Richie thought he was drowning, Bill felt like he finally learnt how to breathe. He had so many words, _fuck_ , did he have words, it was all he was good at despite that shitty barrier of his lips. Yet they all scrambled together, like a game of scrabble with dashed letters across the cardboard.

Fistfuls of shirts clutching like vices, they were not careful. They were not cautious, they were bruising, breaking, grasping. Littered contusions on the slopes of necks disappearing into too many layers, burst berries of summer, a warmth settling into their cold bones.

 

Richie didn’t know where Bill started and he ended, a mess of limbs, a catastrophe of paintwork, hung in a prestigious exhibition to be interpreted and criticized under watchful eyes. Bill was art, Richie decided, tracing his fingers over a line of moles that looked oddly like a constellation. Each touch of his fingers felt like he was remaking Richie, to the point he’d be able to cave in on himself, nest against Bill like a cocoon and be set free like a butterfly.

 

And yet.

 

Despite their differences, the two of them together was like fighting fire with fire. They didn’t even each-other out, they knew that much, there was no calm, no bliss blue sea. Richie finds it funny really, to think that he knew love before Bill, it was almost impossible.

 

Loving Bill was like everything at once, it was coming home from a long day and lying together in his bed with limbs tangled, that easily turned into a wrestle, it was like stumbling through his window at stupid hours from parties with vodka ripe on their tongues, it was like explosive fighting, because he knew that it would never change, always searching for the lowest blow, yet falling back together with the taped seams.

 

But Richie feels safe. Bill feels like home, and childhood bike rides with scraped knees and stained tongues from the blue popsicles, and drawings with Georgie that outlasted his young self. 

 

They aren’t sweet, they aren’t cute. 

 

They are too much and too little all at once. They are the feeling of fingertips sleepily brushing across skin, they are dusk and dawn, they are dark and light.

 

Everything, everything, everything.

 

But, it all starts now. 

 

Everything starts now.

 

There is a small boy, with glasses too big for his face sitting in the sandpit, knees decorated in an assortment of plasters.

 

Behind him, another boy with a stutter that’ll take him almost a decade to mostly get rid of. This is where it begins.

 

“H-Hi.”

 


End file.
